Awakening to Community

Schmidt Number: S-5187

On-line since: 30th September, 2008

VIII

Dornach, March 2,
1923

The meetings at
Stuttgart came to a close two days ago, and you are probably thinking
that I ought to give you a report on some of the things that happened
there. We arrived at a certain definite conclusion, which seemed
inevitable under the conditions that prevailed.

It will be essential
to an understanding of what came about that I give you a sketch of
how things developed. You know from comments I have been making these
past several weeks that lengthy preparations preceded the Stuttgart
meetings. The aim of these preparations, which proved extremely
tiring to all concerned, was to try to create a situation in which
the life-needs of the Anthroposophical Society could be met, thus
ensuring the Society's continuance in the immediate future.

In everything that
follows it should be kept in mind that what went on in Stuttgart did
not have its origin in the sad events surrounding the Goetheanum
fire, nor was it influenced by them. For I had already talked with a
member of the Executive Committee early in December and discussed
with him the necessity of doing something to consolidate the Society,
and he was given the assignment of getting the whole Executive
Committee and various others to take on the problem. So what occurred
in Stuttgart was a direct consequence of the talk I had on December
tenth with Herr Uehli to acquaint him with my observations on the
current state of affairs in the Society.

The burning of the
Goetheanum came as a most painful experience while we were in the
midst of these developments. But even if we still had the Goetheanum
standing here in its pristine form, these things would have happened
exactly as they did. For what was it we faced? We were facing the
fact that the Anthroposophical Society had taken on a form in the
past two decades that had undergone considerable modification since
1919 as a consequence of including various enterprises among its
concerns.

My words could easily
be taken as deprecating these undertakings, but nothing of the sort
is intended. I need only mention the name of the Waldorf School,
which is one of the enterprises I was referring to, to convince you
that my remark was made for quite a different purpose than to express
some superficial judgment. It implied no reflection on the worth and
significance of any of these enterprises or on anyone responsible for
their guidance.

The transactions in
Stuttgart were meant to — and indeed did — concern
themselves solely with the Anthroposophical Society from the aspect
of its whole configuration and how it should be shaped.

Now it is not an easy
matter to describe this configuration as it really is, since it
branches out in so many directions. But I believe that everyone of
you has some idea of how the Society has developed up to the present,
and can picture things for himself with the help of the comments I
have been making here in the past several weeks to round out the
picture.

One of the especially
important developments that have taken place in the Society's life
has been the incurring by leading individuals — or at least by
a considerable number of them — of quite specific
anthroposophical tasks for the Society that have grown out of the
work. These tasks have been waiting for completion since 1919, but
they were not carried out. When the problem this caused became only
too plain, I had to speak to the Central Executive Committee in
Stuttgart as I did on December tenth last.

One of the latest
undertakings to grow out of the soil of the Anthroposophical Movement
was the Movement for Religious Renewal, which has contributed heavily
to the current crisis in the Society. That is one aspect of the facts
that have developed in the Society's life.

The other aspect is
that youth has approached the movement — youth full of deep
inner enthusiasm for anthroposophy and everything it includes, and
university youth has also come into the picture with quite different
expectations, with a quite definite picture of what is to be found in
the Society, with quite definite feelings. One might say that these
academic young people approach the Society with strong heart impulses
and a special sensitivity to the way the anthroposophists reacted to
them, and that they took everything not so much from a rational angle
as in a spirit of keen feeling-judgment.

Now what lay behind
all this?

The fact is, my dear
friends, that young people today are having soul experiences that are
making their first appearance on the stage of human evolution. This
fact is not to be summed up in abstract, superficial phrases about a
generation gap. That gap has always existed in some sense, and been
especially marked in strong personalities while they were young and
preparing themselves for life at an educational institution. We need
only recall certain characteristic examples. You can read in Goethe's
Truth and Science
how, when he was a student in Leipzig, he stayed away from lectures because
he found them so terribly boring, and went instead to the pretzel
bakeshop across the street to chat with companions while Professor
Ludwig and others held forth in the lecture halls on learned
doctrines.

But despite the
ever-present generation gap, even these somewhat radical members of
the younger generation eventually took over their inheritance from
their elders. The geniuses among them did likewise. Goethe most
certainly remained an incomparable genius to the day he died. But
when it came to taking part in the life of his time, he became not
simply Goethe the genius but the fat privy councillor with the double
chin. That must also be recognized.

These things have to
be looked at in a completely unprejudiced way. Until the last third
of the nineteenth century, the generation gap about which people talk
superficially today was always there, but it was resolved in good
philistine style, with youth gradually absorbing more and more
philistine characteristics and entering, as it always had, into what
its elders passed on to it.

Today, however, that
is no longer possible. If one were to use terminology borrowed from
Oriental wisdom, one would have to say that it became impossible when
Kali Yuga ended, because from that time forward social life was no
longer ruled by the principle of authoritarianism as it had been
heretofore. Mankind's involvement in the consciousness soul phase of
its development took ever more marked effect. This lived in the souls
of people born in the 1890's and in the first few years of the
twentieth century, perhaps not in a sharply defined form, but
nevertheless in an extremely strong instinctive way. This inner life
of theirs has to be really lovingly contemplated by older people if
they want to understand it. That takes quite a bit of doing. For our
culture, our civilization has assumed a form, especially in
educational institutions, which makes the resolving of problems
between youth and age that always used to take place no longer
possible. Young people of the present feel this; it is their inner
destiny. It shapes every aspect of their lives, and means that they
approach life with a quite definite craving or demand. This
predisposes present-day young people to become seekers, but seekers
of a wholly different stripe than their elders.

This holds true of
them in every area of life, and especially in the spiritual area. It
is very strange how the older generation has been reacting to them
for some time past. I have not neglected to call your attention to
characteristic instances. Let me remind you of the lecture I gave on
Gregor Mendel. Every now and then, scientists of the twentieth
century have rather vehemently stated it as their opinion that Gregor
Mendel, a Moravian, the solitary schoolmaster who later became an
abbot, was a genius who had made remarkable contributions to the work
of determining the laws of heredity. If we review Gregor Mendel's
relationship to the educational institutions he attended, we cannot
miss the fact that when he was old enough to take his examinations
for the teaching profession he failed them by a wide margin. He was
thereupon given time to prepare himself for a second try. Again he
flunked. At that time — I am speaking of the 1850's —
people were a lot more tolerant than they became later. So, in spite
of his two failures to pass his teacher's examinations, Mendel was
appointed to a secondary school position, and he became the man who
accomplished something regarded as one of the greatest feats in the
field of modern natural science.

Let us take another
case closer at hand: that of Röntgen. Nowadays nobody doubts
that Röntgen is one of the greatest men of modern times. But he
was dismissed from secondary school as a hopeless case. He had the
greatest trouble getting a position as a tutor because he couldn't
finish school; he had been thrown out, and later just barely managed
to get into a college, where he finally graduated. But even then he
was unable to get a tutorial post in the field in which he sought it.
In spite of this, he performed one of the most epoch-making feats in
the fields of practical and theoretical science.

These examples could
be multiplied ad infinitum. On every hand we find indications of the
unbridgeable gap between what older times had to offer and what lives
in youth in an indefinable way.

Putting the matter in
rather radical terms, one can say that modern youth could not care
less how many Egyptian kings' graves are opened; they are not much
concerned with that. But they do care about finding far more original
sources of serving human progress than the opening of ancient kings'
graves offers. Youth feels that we have entered upon a phase of
mankind's evolution in which much more elementary, more original
sources will have to be drawn upon for its furthering.

Now we can certainly
say that young people with this longing have done a great deal of
searching during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Then
they came to know of anthroposophy and felt at once that it led to
the primal sources of their seeking, to the deepest origin of
humanness. They then approached the Anthroposophical Society. And
last Monday or Tuesday a representative of these young people said in
Stuttgart that they had received a shock on approaching it, that the
contrast between the Anthroposophical Society and anthroposophy had
startled them. This is a very weighty fact, is it not? It cannot
simply be dismissed. You have to consider what young people,
especially those from the universities, have had to suffer.

Let us say, for
example, that they wanted to take a doctorate in one of the freer
branches of learning and teaching, such as the history of literature.
How were things done in the last third of the nineteenth century?
Where did most of them get the themes for their dissertations? For
brevity's sake I will have to put it rather radically. The professor
had undertaken to write a book about the Romantic school. So he
assigned one student Novalis, another Friedrich Schlegel, a third
August Wilhelm Schlegel, and a fourth Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann
— if they were lucky. If they weren't, they were assigned
dissertations on Hoffmann's punctuation or his use of parentheses.
The professor then read through these dissertations and took the
substance of his book from them. It had all become quite mechanical.
The young person was just part of a mechanism, a learned mechanism,
and if I may repeat myself, after the end of Kali Yuga everything
that lived in an elemental way in the youthful soul rebelled against
this sort of thing. I am citing just one of countless possible
examples of the same phenomenon.

Now here we have
these two factors side by side: the Anthroposophical Society, in the
form it had assumed during its two decades — a form I need not
describe, as everyone can picture it for himself from his own
standpoint — and the young students. But what the Society was
encountering in these young people was simply the keenest and most
radical fringe of an omnipresent element. This fact stood out only
too plainly at the Stuttgart meetings.

On the one hand, the
leaders of the old society were committed to what had gradually taken
on fixed forms. One was perhaps a Waldorf teacher, another an office
manager at “Der Kommende Tag.” We have to give all due
weight to the fact that all these people were overwhelmed with work.
Everybody in the Society who had any free time had been drawn into
these enterprises. Rightly or wrongly, this caused a certain
bureaucratic spirit to spring up in the Society.

Among these
undertakings was the “Union for the Threefold Membering of the
Social Organism.” Right from the moment of its founding in
1919, it had a director, and after I had worked awhile with this
Union I was compelled to say that I could not go on, that I would
have to withdraw. As I said in Stuttgart recently, I had to strike
out and simply declare that I could not go on.

Then another
director, an excellent man, took things over. I was unable to get to
Stuttgart for several weeks, but when I eventually arrived, I was
anxious to find out what had been happening. There were a number of
matters awaiting disposition, so a meeting was held and I was
informed about what had transpired. I was told, “Well, we've
been setting up a card file. We have small cards on the lower
right-hand section of which we clip the smaller newspaper items, and
then we file them in cabinets. Then there are larger cards made of
heavier paper to which we attach longer magazine articles, and there
are other cards of still another size for filing letters that come
in.” This went on and on. Hours were spent describing the way
the card file was set up, the sacrifice and devotion with which
people had been working on it for many weeks, what it contained, how
everything had been so neatly stowed away in it. Now I had a mental
picture of this card file with all the various sizes of cards in it,
and the marvellous record there of everything that had been going on
in the Society and what our opponents had been up to. It was all
beautifully recorded! There must have been a simply huge pile of
these cards stacked up in layers. But the people sitting there
vanished as though they were ghosts; only the card file was real.
Everything had been recorded!

I said, “Well,
my dear friends, do you have heads as well as a card file? I am not
in the least interested in your files, only in what you have in your
heads.”

I am sure you will
understand that I am not criticizing, just reporting, for the people
who had arranged the files were groaning under the tremendous burden
of their work. But on the other hand, just imagine youth coming there
with their hearts on fire with enthusiasm for ideals that encompassed
the whole future, only to be told the story of the card files. I am
not saying that it was superfluous to have files or that they were of
no value; I am saying that they were excellent and vitally necessary.
But that is not the way things should be going. Hearts were needed to
go out to hearts.

Now this created all
sorts of impossible situations. These and many other problems finally
reached a point where a reorganization of the Society had to be
considered. There had to be a chance for the Society to provide human
beings with opportunities to work in it, to live out their special
individual capacities, to find and breathe an atmosphere in which
they could go on developing. These were absolutely fundamental
problems that the Society was facing. A complete revision of all the
conditions surrounding its life was indicated, and that it has a
tremendous life-potential is shown in the fact that youth has now
approached it full of teeming inner life. But the contrasts grew and
grew.

Of course, there were
some individuals in the older group who had never taken any interest
in the card files (if I may use the files as symptomatic of the whole
approach in question). Some of these others may have been very old
indeed, but still not have wanted to bother with things like the
files, which had gradually become a necessity. There were definitely
such members who had joined the Society as early as 1902 or 1903,
who, though they may have been very different from the young people
in many other respects too, had also never concerned themselves with
what I will term the history of the Society.

So we faced
extraordinarily difficult problems at the preliminary meetings. An
incalculable weight of worry burdened one's soul.

But we don't need to
talk about those sessions now. The Delegates' Conference, a summons
to which was the outcome of the preparatory meetings, was held in
Stuttgart last Sunday. The first order of business was to hear what
the provisional steering committee, which was made up for various
reasons of members of the erstwhile Central Executive and called the
Committee of Nine, had to say about the past and present and future
of the Anthroposophical Society. Then the German and Austrian members
were to be given a hearing in the persons of their delegates.

Well, things
proceeded as planned. But since I want to give you just a brief
sketch of what led to the final decision, I will refrain from
describing what amounted to a veritable hailstorm of motions.
Scarcely was one taken care of and the business of the meeting
resumed than two or three more fairly flew up to the chairman's
table. It can only be described as a hailstorm, and there seemed to
be no end to the discussion about them. But I will skip over all this
and stress instead that absolutely excellent talks were given,
penetrating, deeply anthroposophical talks. Albert Steffen spoke
wonderful, heartfelt, profound words. Mr. Werbeck gave a masterly
description of the categories of our opponents and of their
relationship to the Anthroposophical Movement and to the rest of
civilization. Dr. Büchenbacher gave a vivid account of the way
people who entered the Society from about 1917 on responded to what
they encountered in it. As to the fact that not everything said was
first-rate and as to some lesser contributions in between, it is
probably better to maintain a courteous silence. But excellent,
magnificent contributions were interspersed among what I will refer
to as “others.” In spite of this, Sunday and Monday and
Tuesday passed, and by Tuesday evening a point was reached where one
could see clearly that if the next day, the final one, were to be
anything like the preceding ones, the delegates would leave as they
had come. For almost nothing of what lived in the many individuals
assembed in the hall had really come out, even though much
anthroposophical substance had been contributed in excellent
speeches. This was an assemblage of human beings and the speeches all
dealt with realities, but there was no living reality in the
meetings, just abstraction; they were a classic example of life lived
in the abstract. By Tuesday evening real chaos reigned. Everybody was
talking past everybody else.

Now I had no choice
but to decide to make a proposal of my own directly after the Tuesday
lecture that had been scheduled for me — a proposal based on
what lived in the people represented there — and almost the
entire membership of the German and Austrian Societies was present.
But one had to get at what was real there and pull it together. I was
to speak on Tuesday about community building, a theme called for by
much that had been said. So I made a proposal. I said that we could
see how everyone was talking past the others and that nothing that
was being said was bringing the underlying realities of the situation
to the surface. Leaving other aspects aside for the moment, one could
distinguish two types of feeling, two differing viewpoints, two sets
of opinions. One type is represented by the old Anthroposophical
Society and the committee speaking for it; the other is made up of
individuals who, to put it as exactly as possible, have no real
interest in the stand taken by the committee representing the
Society. They are individuals completely without interest in what the
committee had to say, though they are fine anthroposophists: One can
scarcely imagine anything finer than the contributions made by the
young people at the Stuttgart conference; they reflected an
energetic, wonderful spirit. The soul of youth made a noble
impression as it urgently stormed the gates of anthroposophy. But
here too there was no interest in what the Society was as a society,
or in what it stood for.

A phenomenon like
this has to be taken as a reality. We have to learn to see it as a
fact; there is no use acting like blind men and closing our eyes to
it. So I had no choice but to say that since we were confronted there
with these two types, any abstract talk about reaching agreement was
simply false. The old society cannot be other than it is, nor can the
second group. The Society as a whole will therefore have the best
chance of continuance if each faction goes its own way, with the old
aristocracy — no, let me rather call them the members of the
older society, laden down with history — forming one group, and
the stormily progressive old and young forming another.

There is in existence
an ancient draft of a constitution for the Anthroposophical Society.
I can recommend its study to both parties! Each of them can carry out
its provisions quite literally, but the outcome will be entirely
different in the two cases. That is the way things are in real life,
no matter how they may look in theory.

So I made the
proposal that the old Anthroposophical Society continue with its
Committee of Nine. I characterized things in the following way. I
said that the old society included the prominent Stuttgart members
who carry on their separate undertakings in exemplary fashion and do
a tremendous lot of work; in fact, one of their outstanding
characteristics, demonstrated during the four days of the conference,
was the weariness they brought with them from their previous labors.
I said that when I come to Stuttgart and find something needing to be
done, I have only to press a button; that is the way it has been in
recent years. These leading personalities in Stuttgart are extremely
insightful. They grasp everything immediately without one's having to
say very much. There would never be time enough to discuss everything
at length. Theirs is a lightning grasp; one need only touch on a
matter to have it absolutely clear to them. But for the most part
they do nothing about it. Then there is the other party, full of
anthroposophical soulfulness, whole-heartedly immersed in
anthroposophy. I can also say something to the leaders of this group.
They understand nothing of what I am saying, but they do it that very
instant. That is a tremendous difference. The first group understands
immediately, but does nothing. The second category understands
nothing; they only give promise of eventually understanding
everything; they are full of energy and feeling, but they do the
things at once. They do everything without understanding it.

So there will have to
be two quite differently constituted groups in the Society if it is
to stay united. One group should never be allowed to get in the way
of the other's functioning. There is the one group — what name
shall I give it, since we have to have one? It's just a question of
terminology, of course. Let's call it the conservative, the
traditional party, the neatly-filed members (not to limit the term to
just a set of cards), the party that occupies the curule seats.
People in this party have titles: president, vice president, and so
on, and administer the Society. They sit there and have a routine
procedure for everything. I see a man in the audience looking at me
significantly who, while I was still in Stuttgart, was in a position
to inform me what such procedures sometimes lead to. For example, a
credit slip for a sum like 21 marks was sent out, and it cost 150
marks to send it. That is what it costs these days to send mail to
foreign countries: 150 marks. If one wants to write somebody that a
credit of 21 marks has been entered on the books to his account, it
costs 150 marks to do it properly. That is the way things go in an
orderly ABC set-up. So there we have the party of routines, the old
Anthroposophical Society. One can belong to it and be a good member.
Then there is the free union of individuals who care not a whit for
all that sort of thing, who simply want a loose association based on
a purely human element. These two streams should now be
acknowledged.

I started by giving
just a thumbnail sketch of this, a mere indication. That same evening
a speech was made, maintaining that it would be the worst thing that
could possibly happen, for it would split the Society in two, and so
on. But that was the reality of the situation! If a move were to be
made that fitted the facts rather than the way people thought —
for what they think is seldom as significant as what they are —
it had to be the one suggested, for that would fit the realities
involved. As I said, a speech was instantly made about it, warning of
the terrible consequences that would ensue if anything of the sort
were to prove necessary, and so on.

Even in an external,
purely spatial sense, the outcome was chaos. The hall was crammed
with people huddled in groups, leaving no loopholes to squeeze
through between them, and they all stopped me to ask what this or
that had meant. The inner chaos of the situation had become outer
chaos by eleven o'clock that Tuesday evening when I tried to leave
the assembly hall.

I arrived, rather
weary, at the place where I was staying. At midnight someone came to
fetch me. I wasn't quite on the point of going to sleep. Someone came
and said that a meeting was underway down in the Landhausstrasse. I
was stopped again on my way to the floor where the meeting was in
progress, and drawn into a side-meeting, so that it was nearly one
o'clock in the morning by the time I arrived where I was supposed to
be. But it was at once apparent that my proposal had been understood
after all, quite correctly understood. Now the details could be
profitably discussed. It had become clear that something could really
be done on the basis proposed.

Certain doubts were
expressed, as was perfectly natural. It was said, for example, that
there were members who sympathized with the young people and wanted
to go along with their aims, but who nevertheless belonged
historically to the old society and even held positions in it, which
they wanted to keep so they could go on working there.

I said that this
could easily be solved. The only problem in the case of individuals
who join both sections is to arrange that they pay only one
membership fee. Surely some technical means of doing this can be
worked out. There should be no question of anyone being excluded from
one of the sections because he is a member of the other. In all such
matters, we should simply see to it that the realities of a situation
have a chance to be recognized.

I went on to say that
the various institutions can also accommodate both directions. I can
easily conceive the possibility of a Waldorf teacher leaning toward
the looser association and becoming part of it while a colleague
feels drawn to and joins the more tightly organized group. They will,
of course, still work together at the Waldorf School in a perfectly
harmonious spirit.

Yesterday some people
were wondering how life in this or that branch of the Society would
be affected. I asked why adherents of the two groups should not be
able to sit beside each other at branch meetings. But the inner
realities must always be given a chance to live themselves out. When
a thing is conceived in a realistic spirit, there is always a way of
working it out, and this makes for unity.

It took only until
2:15 a.m. for the young people to become clear on essentials. There
were, however, some white-haired young ones among them who could look
back over a span of quite a few decades. It became clear, as Tuesday
night changed into Wednesday morning, that the proposal would
work.

Wednesday was devoted
to discussing these plans. And Wednesday evening witnessed their
adoption — I will give you just the résumé, and then
add a few supplementary comments to this report.

So there we now have
the old Anthroposophical Society with its Committee of Nine as
described, and the other looser, freer Anthroposophical Society whose
chief striving it is to get anthroposophy out into the world and to
work for a deepening of man's inner life.

Tomorrow and the
following day I will review the most important aspects of the two
lectures I delivered in Stuttgart. They are intimately bound up with
the life in the Anthroposophical Society, for the first lecture was
on the subject of community building and the second on the reasons
why societies based on brotherliness are so given to quarreling.

A provisional
committee was formed for the loose association. It was made up of
Herr Leinhas, Herr Lehrs, Dr. Röschl, Herr Maikowski, Dr.
Büchenbacher, Herr Rath, Herr von Grone, Rector Bartsch from
Breslau, and Herr Schröder. You notice that not all of them are
extremely young; their number includes dignified patriarchs. So the
radicalism of youth will not be the only standpoint represented, but
it will certainly be able to make itself felt.

That is the way
things came out. Now they need only be rightly managed. The loose
association undertook specifically to form smaller, closer
communities — to work for anthroposophy exoterically on a big
scale, and to work esoterically on a small scale forming communities
held together not so much by any set system of external organization
as by inner, karmic ties.

These, then, were the
two groupings we came out with. I will have something more to say
about them tomorrow and the next day. It was a very necessary
development! Anything that is alive refuses to let itself be
preserved in old, preconceived forms; arrangements must change with
and adapt themselves to the living.

You remember my
saying as I left for Stuttgart that the Society's whole problem was
really one of tailoring. Anthroposophy has grown, and its suit, the
Anthroposophical Society — for the Society has gradually become
that — has grown too small. The sleeves scarcely reach to the
elbows, the trousers to the knees. Well, I won't labor the analogy.
The suit looked grotesque, and this was apparent to any wholehearted
person who has recently joined the Society.

Now we shall have to
see whether this effort to make a new, more fitting garment rather
than take the old one apart — for it would certainly get torn
— will succeed. It definitely has the inner capacity to do so.
We shall have to see whether people develop the strength essential to
this way of working. Real life presents very different possibilities
from those of theory, and that holds true in this case also. We will
have to create something that can really stand the test of life.

Now there we have
Herr von Grone, who is a member of both committees, the committee of
the free and the committee of the more tightly organized; he will
serve on both. Things will work out best if we let everybody function
in his own way, either as a patriarch or as a young enthusiast, and
if someone wants to be both at once, why should he not be a
two-headed creature? It is absolutely vital that people's energies
develop freely.

Certain things won't
work, of course. I was told about one such situation, where the
chairman of a group once had the startling experience of yielding the
floor to someone who launched out on a flaming address only to have
another person talk at the same time. The chairman said,
“Friends, this is impossible!” “Why that?”
was the answer. “We're trying to live a philosophy of freedom
here! Why should one's freedom be limited by allowing only one person
to speak? Why can't several talk at the same time?” You will
agree that some things won't work, but fortunately they're not always
specifically called for.

I, for my part, am
thoroughly convinced that things will work again for awhile. Not for
always, though; nothing can be set up for eternity. As time passes we
will again find ourselves confronted with the necessity of devising
new garments for the anthroposophical organism. But every human being
shares that destiny; one can't keep on wearing the same old clothes.
An organization is actually never anything more than a garment for
some living element. Why, then, should one make a special case of
social organisms and try to tailor them for eternity? Everything
living has to undergo change, and only what changes is alive. In the
case of something as particularly teeming with life as the
Anthroposophical Movement we must therefore shape a life-adapted
organization. Of course we can't attempt reorganization every single
day, but we will certainly find it necessary to do so every other
year or so. Otherwise the chairs occupied by the leading members will
really become curule seats, and when some people make a specialty of
resting on the curule seats, those not occupying them begin to itch.
We must find a way to make sitters on curule seats itchy too. In
other words, we're going to have to start jostling these chairs a
little. But if we find the right way of arranging things, everything
will go beautifully.

My dear friends, my
intention was to give you a report. I certainly did not feel it to be
a joking matter. But things of real life are sometimes just exactly
those most suited to a slightly humoristic treatment.